Oh Lord save us from the "invisible hand" bullshit, because we have seen time and time again what the insurance corp will do IRL is simply drop you and let you die thus they have to pay NOTHING! Wow, isn't that great? why pay anything when you can just kick them to the curb, especially when you know its something they will die of before they can go through the courts?
The simple fact is profit motive needs to be 100% removed from healthcare, because otherwise if the treatment the doc wants is expensive or even preventative more often the bean counters simply won't allow it. i could plaster this page with horror story after horror story showing the only thing your "invisible hand' does is help themselves to their customer's wallets, but why bother? I'm sure that anyone that believes the invisible hand myth wouldn't read them anyway. the invisible hand is just another form of the sky bully, its a dogmatic religion with frankly zero basis in reality.
Frankly the only way the invisible hand would work is if you had no governments at all, because as long as they can lobby big corps like insurance and pharma and every other multinational will simply pass on the costs to you anyway. For an example look at the airlines filing bankruptcy with billions in the bank rather than pay their obligations to their employees. the employees took pay cuts and gave all kinds of concessions in exchange for health insurance and now that the time has come to pay up the corps are just keeping the money and walking away. Guess who gets to pay for all those people? that would be YOU.
A functional capitalist system is like a functional communist system or fascist system, they only exist on paper. IRL a few at the top will pay off the right people to rig the game and the peasants get fucked, kinda like what is happening right now.
Actually IIRC it was stated most of what they did was for their Windows VM software (Hyper V? I can't keep up with all the VM names anymore) so that you can run Linux and Windows VMs on a WinServer. Why this would actually make news I don't know as there are tons of companies that add support to Linux for their products,.
How can the "knowledge' of making Linux run so slow it takes 4 and a half hours to boot according to TFA, how can that possibly be helpful? Isn't there smaller distros or software that would be more interesting than 'LOL I made it run on a toaster LOL", seriously? Surely it can't be THAT slow a news day in Linux land right now, can it?
Oh you don't believe that? Why I'm sure the US roads are just covered with hand me down Lexus and Escalade, why even the grannies are all driving luxury hand me downs...(/sarcasm)
Lets face it folks, the medical system is like every other system in the USA right now, completely broken. Works great if you are stinking rich, but WTF doesn't work great if you are stinking rich in the USA? But for the other 99% the system is a broken mess, with waaaay too many waiting until they are at death's door simply because they can't afford treatment, which then ends up with insane bills which they can't pay. If we actually did like the sane countries and paid for preventive medicine and for the small things to be treated before they became big things? Why the costs would drop like a rock. But that would make sense and actually treat everyone equally, can't have that.
How is this insightful? Its not the patients that are "penny wise and pound foolish" but the system. here is an example:
My mom worked critical care for nearly 40 years and one of the biggest things they did was valve replacement. Wanna know why they did a lot of valve replacements? bad teeth. that's right, a $100k+ surgery could have been avoided if they would simply pay for a poor person to get a simple tooth extraction. but they won't pay for that but they WILL pay for valve replacement. So they would get these people in their 30s and 40s that were too poor to afford dental care getting full valve replacements because the infection from their mouths went into their hearts and destroyed the valves.
And it is THAT kind of dumbshit that is breaking us, NOT some patient feeling "entitled". I could sit here and name off hundreds of stories involving tens of millions of dollars where literally a thousand bucks worth of preventive care would have saved tons of money. but the system won't pay for the simple shit, like dental care, so they get these infections that spread and by the time they end up in the hospital it costs a hundreds time to a thousand times more to treat them than it would have costed if they simply would have paid for the simple medicine or tooth pull. Stupid is what it is, fucking stupid. Like someone would sit around in agony with a busted tooth if they could afford to get the damned thing out.
Uhhh...use a small bank that won't fuck you over maybe? Every time any of this kinda crap happens i get a new card issued to me by my bank "just in case' and been told flat footed 'if anybody messes with your account don't worry, just let us know and we'll take care of it, no problem" and actually got to test it last year when ordering some parts and PCs and a company double dipped. i just walked in to my local branch, walked up to the teller i always go to and said 'hey Karen, can you believe i bought something online and they double charged me" and she said 'Ohhh, don't you just HATE that? That happened to my husband a couple of weeks back...now lets see...is it this one right here? okay let me punch this in and...tada! Give the system about 5 minutes to update and it'll be like it never happened" and i thanked her and after BSing a minute walked out and sure enough, like it never happened.
Hell i don't even worry about using my debit card out anymore, its covered to the penny by my bank and one phone call or trip to the local branch and its all taken care of, no muss and no fuss. that's the nice thing about using a small bank, they get to know you and treat you like a person and not a wallet with feet. when i go in to the one on the east side (where my mom banks) I get asked about her and how the oldest is doing in college, i go to the west side (the one my dad uses) I get asked about how dad is doing and get to hear ALL the latest gossip (we call that branch the "hen's nest" for all the gossiping going on) and its nice. no hassles, friendly folks, no worries.
I wonder if this is why i just got new cards even though mine had a year left to go? When these things happen they usually tell the banks first and i'm really happy with how proactive mine has been, if there is even the slightest hint someone may have gotten a number we get new cards. They even called and left me a message to go check my mail for new cards and if they weren't there to come on by and they'd issue a temp card and sure enough they had new cards waiting for me and the next day new PINs. no muss, no fuss, no hassle, i wouldn't change banks for anything.
So its "lets be a douche because we can!" and people wonder why so many geeks are looked down upon as maladjusted assholes? this is the same "logic" which brings so much hate to the Linux community thanks to the "Linux is just a kernel" douchebags, and yes we DO hate you if you say that lame shit and hope you DIAF.
Is it REALLY so fucking hard to just be, oh I don't know...NICE to others? maybe be considerate? shit like this is frankly what is wrong with this country, if given a choice between being considerate or being a flaming dickhole too damned many choose being a flaming prick.
But the VMs don't have GPU aqcceleration, do they? at least they didn't last i looked. That is why I miss the old Win9X box I used to keep for gaming, I could have an old Geforce slapped in there and run all my classic games just fine but i just don't have the room in my apt for another hulking tower and the mini I had finally croaked.
I have to give MSFT credit though, there are only two of my old games that so far I have found ZERO way to play and that is Mechwarrior 3 and i76. With Mechwarrior 3 anything but win98 and you get this bug where the APCs (which you need on many missions) bounce 1000s of feet in the air so you can't use them, and on i76 there are several in game events tied to the CPU timer so that for example if there is a place where you have to make a jump at a certain time the event will never come and the car will never make the jump. But No One lives Forever 1, Soldier of Fortune 1, and thanks to the GOG versions Blood and Redneck Rampage, all run great on Win 7 X64.
Sadly it looks like if someone doesn't come up with kick ass Win9X graphics support in the VMs the Win9X era games are gonna be lost. i can run any NT game no problem, DOS games with DOSBox no problem, but the Win9X era games seem to give everyone the most trouble because of all the hacks they used back then to get more speed. I heard that getting Final Fantasy 7 running on anything but a handful of approved hardware is just insanely difficult and a whole bunch of the Win95 games and unplayable now because of all the hacks.
Not to mention anybody that was there and actually used it (I hung onto OS/2 all the way up until Win2K, after a horrible month attempting to run WinME and being horrified what a step backwards it was) knows that a LOT of what was wrong with OS/2 was NOT the OS, but the company behind it...IBM. In a way the mess with HP and WebOS reminded me of OS/2 because in both cases neither knew how to market the product and thought by sticking their brand in front of it that would magically sell it.
Even though I REALLY liked the OS (its multitasking was years ahead of everybody else at the time) when I saw the ads i was like "Oh shit, its toast" because their entire selling point was "A better Windows than Windows"...WTF? Are you kidding me? Windows CAME ON THE MACHINES and cost NOTHING and you want $200 for your OS and the big selling point is it runs Windows programs? Are you stupid? why should a user or developer support you when your big selling point is you're just an ersatz Windows? And not a great one at that because it only had 16 bit support and Windows was already touting Win32.
It was sad, that's what it was. they had this great thing, something that could have changed the game, and they pissed it all away because they didn't know how to sell it. But we see this all the time, You get these powerful companies that just "pull a Dilbert' and get a case of the stupids. Hell look at MSFT, they FINALLY have an OS to replace XP with, businesses are starting to adopt, so what are they gonna do? Burn their user base chasing fucking cell phones. Fucking retarded, just completely fucking retarded.
I would say, and i'm sure i'll get hate from the fans for saying so, but OS/2 had a better shot than Amiga at the title if they would have just pushed for "developers developers developers" along with plenty of in house programs that showed off the power. When Windows was still stuck with DOS underpinnings and would bitchslap you if you tried to run more than one program at a time OS/2 could multitask like crazy. I'd have a web page open WHILE having a chat session AND listening to music and not a single skip or glitch, it was truly amazing. And unlike Amiga it could run on the bog standard hardware. But first IBM tried to tie it to the hardware they were selling (which was overpriced and behind the curve to boot) and then when that didn't work they tried to sell it for more than the market would bear, just retarded.
BTW if anyone wants to fire up a VM and try it eComstation, which is just a rebranded OS/2, has a trial version i think. try it and remember that when it came out Windows was on 3.x and be blown away at how solid it was.
Not to mention no less than 2 Tampa bay stations have reported that at least 2 other people called 911 and both said Zimmerman was on the ground. I'd like to know why some other questions aren't being asked, such as 1.-Why is someone walking around a gated community that they don't live at at 10:30 at night? why did they have a full black outfit with a black hoodie pulled up around their face when it was 83 degrees F?
I'm sorry but the whole thing smells and the fact his mother filed a patent on his name and a lawsuit before he was even cold just makes it all the more sickening and sad, not to mention the "mourners" robbing the Walgreen like its Xmas.
This whole thing looks to me like a manufactured racial thing so the media can milk it for some ratings. Sick, sad, and pathetic but when all you see on the MSM is manufactured crap one really shouldn't be surprised. After all it was a slow week as they didn't have any Kardashian or Snooki "news' to sell.
Thanks bro, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Kinda missed the point I was getting at which is this: if you do not give them your money they will take it by force of government and you have NO say in the matter. the people said NO! to 150 year copyrights, the people said NO! to bailouts, the people said NO! to the fed making their money less valuable with QE1 and QE2, the people said NO! to continuing the wars killing our kids....see a pattern there friend?
As the late great philosopher George Carlin put it "Its over, the game is rigged, its never gonna get any better, because that is how the owners of this country want it" and if you ever do manage to make even a teeny tiny scratch in their corporate profits they'll have their MSM propaganda machine, which makes the old Soviet system look like a free press, label you a terrorist kiddie fiddling monster, and then nobody will listen to you because the public believes what they see on TV.
So you can ban and boycott all you want, never download so much as a single MP3, they'll just add a 30% surcharge to your CDs, followed by a 40% surcharge to your DVDs and USB HDDs and if thay don't get enough profits from that they will just find more things to tax, maybe a 40% surcharge on every single device capable of playing a video or a song? That is what happens when a system is corrupted, they can use the force of government to make sure they NEVER lose, no matter what the people say or do. Sadly the system is so badly rigged now I doubt one of the top 5% could lose if they tried, they'd just be handed someone else's money to make up for their losses.
BMO if you want to argue THAT point you might as well be hosting a "Ban Facebook!" party because as we have seen dumbasses will post INCREDIBLY detailed shit about their daily lives to FB. No need for big bro to follow anyone, just subscribe to their FB page and you can practically follow them minute by minute!
In the end though the original poster was trying to make this some big brother plot and when I pointed out it would be stupid THEN they switched to the stupid user scenario. But if you want to argue stupid users you might as well ban CCs, Internet banking, Internet shopping, FB, all of these thing have the potential for stupid people to do REALLY dumb shit, but again we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater because some retards will drown their dumb selves in it do we?
Ultimately you can't baby proof the planet, sooner or later people have to take responsibility for their actions. in the end its like I tell my customers "I can build you a secure computer, if you listen to it and do what it says? you WILL be safe. it will have heuristics and sandboxing and it will update and scan itself but one thing it can NOT do is rip the keyboard out of your hand. if it says 'Don't do that" and you refuse to listen and do that anyway? Ultimately YOU have to choose whether to listen or not" and that is the exact same case here. The TV companies show them how to turn it off and on, how to have it completely disconnected if they like, but if they refuse to listen and then blast their version of Goatse across the net? Stupid fucking them, we shouldn't throw tech out just because a few people are lazy idiots.
After all if we threw out tech that causes lazy idiots harm we'd have no cell phones (idiots play with them doing 70+MPH down the road) MP3 players and PMPs (idiots walk into traffic blasting their shitty music so they couldn't hear a gun go off next to them) GPS units (same as cell phones) or pretty much anything most complex than a speak n spell.
I hate to say it but I agree AC, this is why I tell my customers to use "defense in depth" so that if the cloud disappeared tomorrow they would lose nothing. Using a combo of USB HDDs, DVDs, and the cloud one can make your most important data practically destruction proof but this shows why the cloud by itself is simply useless. For the best defense in depth one should have a relative you swap USB HDDs with on a weekly or bi-monthly option and send the DVDs to a relative for safe keeping.
I got to see how well defense in depth works when a customer had a fire burn his home to the ground, nothing left but the concrete slab it was built on, he grabbed the USB HDD that he had been swapping weekly with his father for backups and in less than 4 hours I had him completely restored onto a new machine,and the only thing he needed the cloud for was a couple of pics he had uploaded after the last swap.
As we saw with the article earlier about the MAFIAA attacking every other place that lets users store files the cloud is pretty much worthless now unless you are a corp, and even then you better have some idea the financial state of the corp you are doing business with as companies go under every day. Finally if the ISP end up with the caps they want the cost of backing anything larger than pics to the cloud will become too expensive for all but the big corps anyway. I'm betting this whole "push to the cloud" will go the same way it went last time it happened, anybody remember thin clients and the whole "just use the net" push we had a decade ago? remember what happened? economy went sour and the dotbomb took out a ton of companies and that died a quick death.
You are most welcome, thanks for the warm fuzzy feeling from knowing I've helped out another geek make their life just a little easier. Another link you might enjoy is WSUS Offline which makes updating Windows to current beyond simple. No more of this "update and reboot, update and reboot" crap, and it gives you the option of adding.NET and IE, as well as MSE or Windows Defender definitions, just two clicks and it'll update the OS to current. I have every update from XP-Win 7 X64, all nice and neat and easy, but if you are only gonna be installing a single version of Windows you can simply check the box for that version and have WSUS Offline download all the updates and have them ready for you, oh and can include all the MS Office updates if you plan on installing MS Office as well. Between that and Ninite it really takes all the hassle and bullshit out of a clean install. It even has a checkbox so that you can have it copy the updates to a stick or burn a disc, that way if you are like me and don't like letting a Windows machine that isn't fully updated onto the net you can just pop in the stick and let WSUS take care of the rest.
But I'm glad you enjoy Ninite, please tell your friends as it makes clean installs about as hassle free as they can be. you can even suggest new apps and if they get a lot of calls for a program they'll add it to the list, for example myself and several others asked for kilte (has really great DXVA support) and voila! there it is. Enjoy!
And there are plenty of people that still have the 30 day trial of Norton that ran out 5 years ago and haven't updated their OS in just as long...the point? this discussion was about the government, not dumbasses being dumbasses. At least in most cases with the TV they have to go an extra length to be dumbasses as most current routers are IP V4 and are NATed so you can't just waltz in, 5 will get you 10 those Trendnet cams are using the crappy routers you get from the ISPs that usually have every kind of possible security measure turned OFF so they don't have to deal with support calls.
Thanks for the link though, as it does show that what I said about NAT being a good thing is correct. while NAT wasn't originally meant to be a security measure it really does help the really stupid from just blasting all their shit all over the net. But hell if you want to see lists of people being incredibly fucking stupid just look up the Quickbook file formats on any major P2P, you'll see moron after moron that have shared their entire drive with the planet, including their tax records, account info at the bank, just incredible the amount of ignorant shit, but that don't mean we throw out the baby with the bathwater do we?
Doesn't work, and here is why: PPT math. You see they simply go into whatever legislature they intend to corrupt with a PPT and give a spiel like this 'As you can see here our focus group says people like X and people like Y, so by this chart here you can see that we SHOULD have made X PLUS Y but since we didn't? it must be those ebil pirates argh!" and then they will simply take your money in the form of a tax, while getting any draconian law passed, after they hand out the bribes of course. See the extra price added to CDs to cover piracy in many places for example.
You see just like the banks these multinationals have a great "heads i win tails you lose' sort of thing going and there is pretty much not a damned thing you can do to stop it. After all it doesn't matter what the people say or do, the elected officials simply ignore them if it comes down to them or a multinational. throw them out, you just replace shill A with shill B, no change at all. Hell I don't know a single person that has bought one of their CDs at retail in years, we all buy indie artists or pick them up at a used CD shop, see it make ANY difference?
Did they remove the ability to just shoot an email to everybody in your address books? because that is what all my friends and family does. in fact the ONLY thing I've seen everyone doing with their FB profiles is those damned Zynga games. While i personally don't get it those damned clickfests are like catnip to females, I've even built machines based around how well they run FB games.
if G+ wants to take off they need to come up with a ton of games that makes the average guy feel like he is a hamster slapping a lever to get a pellet, the more slap happy the better as that is what the women seem to enjoy. I swear the best day of my life was when I got my GF into mystery and crime solving games like CSI as when she would stay over for the weekend the sound of her tapping that damned mouse every morning (7AM sharp, just like clockwork) made me want to pull an Elvis on my PC.
Riiight, because THAT is what a militant police state would want, free amateur porn. I can just imagine the conversations now "OMFG, would you look at the faces THAT guy is making? It looks like he's gonna drop a deuce LOL!" or "Oh shit, not that fat girl again, every time she bounces its like watching a 70s water bed with all the ripples!"
I can think of a few reasons why something like that might be useful to a government, but watching the average couple fuck? Not enough brain bleach in the world for that my friend, they'd be rolling agents out of the central viewing area with thousand yard stares and just rocking themselves going "Didn't want to see that, didn't want to see that" over and over.
Pointing out a patent troll is a patent troll is FUD? can I have some of what you are smoking please?
That would be like screaming TROLL when someone says "Rambus is a patent troll". Actually its even worse than that as Rambus did make the occasional product whereas the ONLY reason MPEG-LA exists is to troll, that's it. they don't make any tech, pay for any research, they are a pile of patents gotten together to make sure everyone in the pool gets a cut from their trolling without having their own names being dragged through the muck as trolls.
But if you think it is FUD show me ONE, just one mind you, case in which MPEG-LA was friendly and/or supportive of FOSS. I can already tell you that you ain't gonna find shit, on the other hand you will find plenty of cases of them being hostile to FOSS such as saying they would sue Mozilla if they tried to include H.264 support without paying their license fees.
In the end this doesn't have a damned thing to do with the technical merits of H.264, that is a red herring and in fact Flash often used h.264. No what mattered is that the community was biting the hand that feeds because Adobe was paying the license fee for the ENTIRE community, well guess what? that's over, pay up suckers.
In the end the ONLY ones that got trolled was the FOSS community which Steve jobs played like a harp from hell. It was common knowledge that Jobs hated Flash because it offered a way around his app store, so he talked about how much better his iShiny was without flash and the FOSS community jumped right on board, even though Jobs has always been militant ANTI-FOSS and actually made gates and MSFT look like the Care Bears. it was Jobs that first locked devices to the OS, it was Jobs that first added DRM so you could only use it HIS way, while Adobe let you do any damned thing you wanted, including both distributing AND making a knockoff, did they sue? nope.
So as I said i don't care, my license fees are paid for. if the rumors are correct then Moz will ONLY have H.264 on Windows because MSFT pays their fees, and all it takes is MPEG-LA filing an injunction to have the plugged pulled on X.264 because of their patents. I was simply pointing out the absolute batshit insanity of getting rid of a FOSS friendly if a little clueless company like Adobe for a FOSS hating patent troll. But hey, enjoy your lack of media or paying for your software, my fees are paid in full thanks to MSFT.
Then they REALLY need to change the wording because it is REALLY confusing. I mean i'm sure that when 99.999% of the population hears the word "radio' they automatically think of AM/FM, after all that word has been pretty much the sole property of those bands for over a century. Hell we don't say "Sell me a Wifi radio" do we? Or a bluetooth radio? of course not.
So they should really change the name to "wireless signal processing' or something like that. When you see wireless signal processing you automatically think of ALL the different wireless signals, like BT and Wifi, cell phones, its just a better descriptor. I'm a firm believer in what George Carlin would say about words mattering, and in this case the language is VERY misleading as to what the thing actually does. If they were to start using WSP they would probably get more buzz and people interested in helping as THAT does sound interesting and neat, but software radio makes me think of some crystal radio kinda thing using a PC, not very interesting at all.
And it all depends on what the neighbors actually DO and if they are decent folks or not IMHO. The ones that originally moved onto the land behind my mom's place frankly trashed it, not only did they cut down the trees but they put a couple of mangy horses out there which wiped out the grass and caused little mudflows down onto my mom's property, just a real mess.
Lucky for us when my mom found out who owned that land behind her and called him to complain he was like "What renter? I haven't touched that property in years, i was waiting for my daughter to finish college before i built her a little house out there" so he called the cops and had them evicted and their mobile home hauled off. Now his daughter is in her little house up there and not only did she plant a bunch of nice trees and fix the place back up but when her husband is out there running the chipper and fixing up the place he'll come over onto mom's property and help her out by cutting any dead limbs and putting a little mulch around her trees to make them nice and easy to mow. So i'd say it all comes down to attitude, a little consideration goes a long way. Hell those squatters could have stayed there another 3 years with nobody the wiser if they just wouldn't have acted like assholes.
As for TFA, you do something for free? Tough fucking luck, you knew what you were getting into. I'm sure/. and LinuxInsider is making money off everything i post on either site but so what? does that make me entitled to a cut? its not like anyone forces me join in to Ms Noyes little round table discussions or to comment on/., i do so because i enjoy the conversations with other geeks and trying to find geek hangouts where I live is practically impossible, so having discussions on tech where people actually understand what I say is quite pleasant after dealing with people all day that don't know the difference between HDDs and RAM, or a tower and the monitor. TFA sounds like a bunch of whiny entitled types that got butthurt because nobody would pay them for their "incredible insight". Well if you think your "words of wisdom" are worth so much write a blog and quit giving it away for free, duh! of course if they did that then most likely they would have readerships in the single digits if they are lucky. at least here on/. I can point folks towards good software they may have overlooked like Comodo Dragon and Time Machine or QTWeb, and great sites for geeks like Ninite (Godsend for new installs, check it out) and it gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling when someone comments "Hey, thanks for pointing that out, I tried it and really like it a lot" and THAT is my payment for posting.
So even you admit its the death of the whole "free as in beer" part of FOSS. And frankly it doesn't bother me, i use Windows where MSFT pays my license fee. what DOES bother me is frankly i don't believe the web should be locked down as we already saw what that got us with IE and all those damned proprietary formats like RMV and WMV. I had hope that the developers would stand their ground and refuse to support HTML V5 until a baseline codec was chosen that ALL could use without getting "pay your $699 license fee" but it looks like that is over.
I DO however find it funny as hell the "FOSSies", those that are the rampant fanbois of the FOSS world, can't even see the freight train barreling down the tracks. they had such a fucking hatred for Flash because it was buggy they are too fucking clueless to see what it is obviously gonna be replaced with has more ways to buttfuck them than SCO ever even dreamed of and you know what? Unlike SCO these patents WILL stick and royally assrape any chance of "free as in beer" remaining a viable option.
Personally I'm glad, maybe once free as in beer is thrown in the trash heap of history they will wake the fuck up and realize TINSTAAFL and maybe with all the major distros being forced to charge to pay their $699 license fees and to remove the right to redistribute (because MPEG-LA sure as fuck isn't gonna sell you a blanket license for shit) then MAYBE, just maybe, will the distros have enough funds to make a truly world class OS instead of constantlybreaking shit. One can hope after all.
BTW isn't it funny that I get modded as a troll for daring to point out reality? Does ANYONE believe MPEG-LA is gonna be all warm and fuzzy to the Linux community, when it has over 2000+ patents that pretty much cover EVERY possible way to encode and decode video and has been willing to bitchslap anyone and everyone with a lawsuit if they don't pay their $699 license fees? pretty damned funny if you ask me that so many are blinded by their perception bubbles to see they just threw away the mangy old mutt that was friendly known as flash for a rabid pitbull that looks at their ass like a starving man looks at a T-Bone steak. Fucking stupid FOSSies are gonna get run over like a Mac truck and are too damned clueless to even see it coming, too fucking funny.
Then it sounds like the problem is NOT with the cards which I agree have almost gotten to contact lens "Oh shit, nobody move!" levels of teeny tiny but in the reader which obviously should be redesigned. Maybe it should just be an electrical connector and then have the actually processing done on the CPU? it isn't like those aren't insanely powerful now on your average phone. or maybe a specialized ARM chip off to the side somewhere, just not built into the actual reader part.
The problem i have with changing what we have now is not only are the cards too damned teeny tiny as it is, and I agree that they have taken the whole "thin is in" thing too damned far and they are getting to the point they are too easily flexed and broken, not to mention shitty battery life, but my biggest concern is we have every company trying to pull a Rambus when it comes to patents. We have too damned many patents in the phone arena as it is, having yet another patented up the ass design is exactly the LAST thing we need.
I have a good question....why? Are radio chips REALLY expensive or something now? hell all the old analog TV tuners had radios built in and they ended up dropping the feature because nobody used the damned things, so why would you want to do it much more inefficiently in software? this is one of those things like that cassette deck for PCs where i sit there with a serious "WTF?" look on my face because i honestly don't get it. I mean all you are picking up is standard radio, right? no police bands or anything cool like that? hell there are a bazillion free radio station on the net and unlike the clearchannel crapola they play music that doesn't suck.
So I'm sorry if I'm missing something but i really don't get it. Radio is all but dead now anyway, you have tons of free streams, so why care about adding a dying format to your PC?
I'm afraid the preview function often fails, at least it does for me, when I am trying to make a link that isn't clickable. it looks like its not gonna be a link but then/. turns it into a link when you hit submit, or at least it did when i was using the new layout which is one of the reasons I went back to the old way. When i put a link to a small site that i don't want/.ed I do NOT want it to be clickable as everyone knows there are plenty that won't bother with copy/paste unless it is something they really care to see.
As for TFA I wonder how damned long the MAFIAA are gonna play whack a mole before they just accept reality and embrace new technology? there is no damned logical reason why I can't go to Amazon, whip out a CC, and buy a movie or show in.avi or.mkv for playing on my dad's media tank but as it is here are my choices...1.-Buy DVD, 2.-wait for DVD to arrive, 3.-rip DVD into format that will play on media tank, 4.-upload video onto media tank. or I can 1.-download from TPB in the format I need, 2.-stick file on media tank....now which one is easier? Which one has fewer steps?
So why the bullshit, does it in ANY way hinder piracy? nope, in fact the pirates often have the movie or show at or before release day. So wake up and smell the 21st century MAFIAA and embrace the Valve model, make it easy, make it simple, make it cheap. I'm sure you could power half the USA just by wrapping Henry Ford's corpse in copper for all the spinning he is doing in his grave from so many fucking up one of the most basic tenants of capitalism with all their hoop jumping and artificial scarcity bullshit. He'd be cranking that shit out in any and every format someone would give him money for and backing the money truck up to his back door daily.
It just amazes me that all these so called "MBA" or Masters of Being Assholes, can't even figure out the most basic ideas of supply and demand. Black markets are the market's way of telling you that you are fucking up, your price is too high or you aren't offering the people what they want. make it easy, make it simple, make it cheap, and watch the huge piles of money rolling in. In a way it reminds me of how the MPAA had to be literally dragged to the huge profits that videotapes offered, because until the government literally forced them to allow the format to exist they were comparing it to the Boston Strangler. How many BILLIONS did they make off of videotapes again?
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Oh Lord save us from the "invisible hand" bullshit, because we have seen time and time again what the insurance corp will do IRL is simply drop you and let you die thus they have to pay NOTHING! Wow, isn't that great? why pay anything when you can just kick them to the curb, especially when you know its something they will die of before they can go through the courts?
The simple fact is profit motive needs to be 100% removed from healthcare, because otherwise if the treatment the doc wants is expensive or even preventative more often the bean counters simply won't allow it. i could plaster this page with horror story after horror story showing the only thing your "invisible hand' does is help themselves to their customer's wallets, but why bother? I'm sure that anyone that believes the invisible hand myth wouldn't read them anyway. the invisible hand is just another form of the sky bully, its a dogmatic religion with frankly zero basis in reality.
Frankly the only way the invisible hand would work is if you had no governments at all, because as long as they can lobby big corps like insurance and pharma and every other multinational will simply pass on the costs to you anyway. For an example look at the airlines filing bankruptcy with billions in the bank rather than pay their obligations to their employees. the employees took pay cuts and gave all kinds of concessions in exchange for health insurance and now that the time has come to pay up the corps are just keeping the money and walking away. Guess who gets to pay for all those people? that would be YOU.
A functional capitalist system is like a functional communist system or fascist system, they only exist on paper. IRL a few at the top will pay off the right people to rig the game and the peasants get fucked, kinda like what is happening right now.
Actually IIRC it was stated most of what they did was for their Windows VM software (Hyper V? I can't keep up with all the VM names anymore) so that you can run Linux and Windows VMs on a WinServer. Why this would actually make news I don't know as there are tons of companies that add support to Linux for their products,.
How can the "knowledge' of making Linux run so slow it takes 4 and a half hours to boot according to TFA, how can that possibly be helpful? Isn't there smaller distros or software that would be more interesting than 'LOL I made it run on a toaster LOL", seriously? Surely it can't be THAT slow a news day in Linux land right now, can it?
Oh you don't believe that? Why I'm sure the US roads are just covered with hand me down Lexus and Escalade, why even the grannies are all driving luxury hand me downs...(/sarcasm)
Lets face it folks, the medical system is like every other system in the USA right now, completely broken. Works great if you are stinking rich, but WTF doesn't work great if you are stinking rich in the USA? But for the other 99% the system is a broken mess, with waaaay too many waiting until they are at death's door simply because they can't afford treatment, which then ends up with insane bills which they can't pay. If we actually did like the sane countries and paid for preventive medicine and for the small things to be treated before they became big things? Why the costs would drop like a rock. But that would make sense and actually treat everyone equally, can't have that.
How is this insightful? Its not the patients that are "penny wise and pound foolish" but the system. here is an example:
My mom worked critical care for nearly 40 years and one of the biggest things they did was valve replacement. Wanna know why they did a lot of valve replacements? bad teeth. that's right, a $100k+ surgery could have been avoided if they would simply pay for a poor person to get a simple tooth extraction. but they won't pay for that but they WILL pay for valve replacement. So they would get these people in their 30s and 40s that were too poor to afford dental care getting full valve replacements because the infection from their mouths went into their hearts and destroyed the valves.
And it is THAT kind of dumbshit that is breaking us, NOT some patient feeling "entitled". I could sit here and name off hundreds of stories involving tens of millions of dollars where literally a thousand bucks worth of preventive care would have saved tons of money. but the system won't pay for the simple shit, like dental care, so they get these infections that spread and by the time they end up in the hospital it costs a hundreds time to a thousand times more to treat them than it would have costed if they simply would have paid for the simple medicine or tooth pull. Stupid is what it is, fucking stupid. Like someone would sit around in agony with a busted tooth if they could afford to get the damned thing out.
Uhhh...use a small bank that won't fuck you over maybe? Every time any of this kinda crap happens i get a new card issued to me by my bank "just in case' and been told flat footed 'if anybody messes with your account don't worry, just let us know and we'll take care of it, no problem" and actually got to test it last year when ordering some parts and PCs and a company double dipped. i just walked in to my local branch, walked up to the teller i always go to and said 'hey Karen, can you believe i bought something online and they double charged me" and she said 'Ohhh, don't you just HATE that? That happened to my husband a couple of weeks back...now lets see...is it this one right here? okay let me punch this in and...tada! Give the system about 5 minutes to update and it'll be like it never happened" and i thanked her and after BSing a minute walked out and sure enough, like it never happened.
Hell i don't even worry about using my debit card out anymore, its covered to the penny by my bank and one phone call or trip to the local branch and its all taken care of, no muss and no fuss. that's the nice thing about using a small bank, they get to know you and treat you like a person and not a wallet with feet. when i go in to the one on the east side (where my mom banks) I get asked about her and how the oldest is doing in college, i go to the west side (the one my dad uses) I get asked about how dad is doing and get to hear ALL the latest gossip (we call that branch the "hen's nest" for all the gossiping going on) and its nice. no hassles, friendly folks, no worries.
I wonder if this is why i just got new cards even though mine had a year left to go? When these things happen they usually tell the banks first and i'm really happy with how proactive mine has been, if there is even the slightest hint someone may have gotten a number we get new cards. They even called and left me a message to go check my mail for new cards and if they weren't there to come on by and they'd issue a temp card and sure enough they had new cards waiting for me and the next day new PINs. no muss, no fuss, no hassle, i wouldn't change banks for anything.
So its "lets be a douche because we can!" and people wonder why so many geeks are looked down upon as maladjusted assholes? this is the same "logic" which brings so much hate to the Linux community thanks to the "Linux is just a kernel" douchebags, and yes we DO hate you if you say that lame shit and hope you DIAF.
Is it REALLY so fucking hard to just be, oh I don't know...NICE to others? maybe be considerate? shit like this is frankly what is wrong with this country, if given a choice between being considerate or being a flaming dickhole too damned many choose being a flaming prick.
But the VMs don't have GPU aqcceleration, do they? at least they didn't last i looked. That is why I miss the old Win9X box I used to keep for gaming, I could have an old Geforce slapped in there and run all my classic games just fine but i just don't have the room in my apt for another hulking tower and the mini I had finally croaked.
I have to give MSFT credit though, there are only two of my old games that so far I have found ZERO way to play and that is Mechwarrior 3 and i76. With Mechwarrior 3 anything but win98 and you get this bug where the APCs (which you need on many missions) bounce 1000s of feet in the air so you can't use them, and on i76 there are several in game events tied to the CPU timer so that for example if there is a place where you have to make a jump at a certain time the event will never come and the car will never make the jump. But No One lives Forever 1, Soldier of Fortune 1, and thanks to the GOG versions Blood and Redneck Rampage, all run great on Win 7 X64.
Sadly it looks like if someone doesn't come up with kick ass Win9X graphics support in the VMs the Win9X era games are gonna be lost. i can run any NT game no problem, DOS games with DOSBox no problem, but the Win9X era games seem to give everyone the most trouble because of all the hacks they used back then to get more speed. I heard that getting Final Fantasy 7 running on anything but a handful of approved hardware is just insanely difficult and a whole bunch of the Win95 games and unplayable now because of all the hacks.
Not to mention anybody that was there and actually used it (I hung onto OS/2 all the way up until Win2K, after a horrible month attempting to run WinME and being horrified what a step backwards it was) knows that a LOT of what was wrong with OS/2 was NOT the OS, but the company behind it...IBM. In a way the mess with HP and WebOS reminded me of OS/2 because in both cases neither knew how to market the product and thought by sticking their brand in front of it that would magically sell it.
Even though I REALLY liked the OS (its multitasking was years ahead of everybody else at the time) when I saw the ads i was like "Oh shit, its toast" because their entire selling point was "A better Windows than Windows"...WTF? Are you kidding me? Windows CAME ON THE MACHINES and cost NOTHING and you want $200 for your OS and the big selling point is it runs Windows programs? Are you stupid? why should a user or developer support you when your big selling point is you're just an ersatz Windows? And not a great one at that because it only had 16 bit support and Windows was already touting Win32.
It was sad, that's what it was. they had this great thing, something that could have changed the game, and they pissed it all away because they didn't know how to sell it. But we see this all the time, You get these powerful companies that just "pull a Dilbert' and get a case of the stupids. Hell look at MSFT, they FINALLY have an OS to replace XP with, businesses are starting to adopt, so what are they gonna do? Burn their user base chasing fucking cell phones. Fucking retarded, just completely fucking retarded.
I would say, and i'm sure i'll get hate from the fans for saying so, but OS/2 had a better shot than Amiga at the title if they would have just pushed for "developers developers developers" along with plenty of in house programs that showed off the power. When Windows was still stuck with DOS underpinnings and would bitchslap you if you tried to run more than one program at a time OS/2 could multitask like crazy. I'd have a web page open WHILE having a chat session AND listening to music and not a single skip or glitch, it was truly amazing. And unlike Amiga it could run on the bog standard hardware. But first IBM tried to tie it to the hardware they were selling (which was overpriced and behind the curve to boot) and then when that didn't work they tried to sell it for more than the market would bear, just retarded.
BTW if anyone wants to fire up a VM and try it eComstation, which is just a rebranded OS/2, has a trial version i think. try it and remember that when it came out Windows was on 3.x and be blown away at how solid it was.
Not to mention no less than 2 Tampa bay stations have reported that at least 2 other people called 911 and both said Zimmerman was on the ground. I'd like to know why some other questions aren't being asked, such as 1.-Why is someone walking around a gated community that they don't live at at 10:30 at night? why did they have a full black outfit with a black hoodie pulled up around their face when it was 83 degrees F?
I'm sorry but the whole thing smells and the fact his mother filed a patent on his name and a lawsuit before he was even cold just makes it all the more sickening and sad, not to mention the "mourners" robbing the Walgreen like its Xmas.
This whole thing looks to me like a manufactured racial thing so the media can milk it for some ratings. Sick, sad, and pathetic but when all you see on the MSM is manufactured crap one really shouldn't be surprised. After all it was a slow week as they didn't have any Kardashian or Snooki "news' to sell.
Thanks bro, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Kinda missed the point I was getting at which is this: if you do not give them your money they will take it by force of government and you have NO say in the matter. the people said NO! to 150 year copyrights, the people said NO! to bailouts, the people said NO! to the fed making their money less valuable with QE1 and QE2, the people said NO! to continuing the wars killing our kids....see a pattern there friend?
As the late great philosopher George Carlin put it "Its over, the game is rigged, its never gonna get any better, because that is how the owners of this country want it" and if you ever do manage to make even a teeny tiny scratch in their corporate profits they'll have their MSM propaganda machine, which makes the old Soviet system look like a free press, label you a terrorist kiddie fiddling monster, and then nobody will listen to you because the public believes what they see on TV.
So you can ban and boycott all you want, never download so much as a single MP3, they'll just add a 30% surcharge to your CDs, followed by a 40% surcharge to your DVDs and USB HDDs and if thay don't get enough profits from that they will just find more things to tax, maybe a 40% surcharge on every single device capable of playing a video or a song? That is what happens when a system is corrupted, they can use the force of government to make sure they NEVER lose, no matter what the people say or do. Sadly the system is so badly rigged now I doubt one of the top 5% could lose if they tried, they'd just be handed someone else's money to make up for their losses.
BMO if you want to argue THAT point you might as well be hosting a "Ban Facebook!" party because as we have seen dumbasses will post INCREDIBLY detailed shit about their daily lives to FB. No need for big bro to follow anyone, just subscribe to their FB page and you can practically follow them minute by minute!
In the end though the original poster was trying to make this some big brother plot and when I pointed out it would be stupid THEN they switched to the stupid user scenario. But if you want to argue stupid users you might as well ban CCs, Internet banking, Internet shopping, FB, all of these thing have the potential for stupid people to do REALLY dumb shit, but again we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater because some retards will drown their dumb selves in it do we?
Ultimately you can't baby proof the planet, sooner or later people have to take responsibility for their actions. in the end its like I tell my customers "I can build you a secure computer, if you listen to it and do what it says? you WILL be safe. it will have heuristics and sandboxing and it will update and scan itself but one thing it can NOT do is rip the keyboard out of your hand. if it says 'Don't do that" and you refuse to listen and do that anyway? Ultimately YOU have to choose whether to listen or not" and that is the exact same case here. The TV companies show them how to turn it off and on, how to have it completely disconnected if they like, but if they refuse to listen and then blast their version of Goatse across the net? Stupid fucking them, we shouldn't throw tech out just because a few people are lazy idiots.
After all if we threw out tech that causes lazy idiots harm we'd have no cell phones (idiots play with them doing 70+MPH down the road) MP3 players and PMPs (idiots walk into traffic blasting their shitty music so they couldn't hear a gun go off next to them) GPS units (same as cell phones) or pretty much anything most complex than a speak n spell.
I hate to say it but I agree AC, this is why I tell my customers to use "defense in depth" so that if the cloud disappeared tomorrow they would lose nothing. Using a combo of USB HDDs, DVDs, and the cloud one can make your most important data practically destruction proof but this shows why the cloud by itself is simply useless. For the best defense in depth one should have a relative you swap USB HDDs with on a weekly or bi-monthly option and send the DVDs to a relative for safe keeping.
I got to see how well defense in depth works when a customer had a fire burn his home to the ground, nothing left but the concrete slab it was built on, he grabbed the USB HDD that he had been swapping weekly with his father for backups and in less than 4 hours I had him completely restored onto a new machine,and the only thing he needed the cloud for was a couple of pics he had uploaded after the last swap.
As we saw with the article earlier about the MAFIAA attacking every other place that lets users store files the cloud is pretty much worthless now unless you are a corp, and even then you better have some idea the financial state of the corp you are doing business with as companies go under every day. Finally if the ISP end up with the caps they want the cost of backing anything larger than pics to the cloud will become too expensive for all but the big corps anyway. I'm betting this whole "push to the cloud" will go the same way it went last time it happened, anybody remember thin clients and the whole "just use the net" push we had a decade ago? remember what happened? economy went sour and the dotbomb took out a ton of companies and that died a quick death.
You are most welcome, thanks for the warm fuzzy feeling from knowing I've helped out another geek make their life just a little easier. Another link you might enjoy is WSUS Offline which makes updating Windows to current beyond simple. No more of this "update and reboot, update and reboot" crap, and it gives you the option of adding .NET and IE, as well as MSE or Windows Defender definitions, just two clicks and it'll update the OS to current. I have every update from XP-Win 7 X64, all nice and neat and easy, but if you are only gonna be installing a single version of Windows you can simply check the box for that version and have WSUS Offline download all the updates and have them ready for you, oh and can include all the MS Office updates if you plan on installing MS Office as well. Between that and Ninite it really takes all the hassle and bullshit out of a clean install. It even has a checkbox so that you can have it copy the updates to a stick or burn a disc, that way if you are like me and don't like letting a Windows machine that isn't fully updated onto the net you can just pop in the stick and let WSUS take care of the rest.
But I'm glad you enjoy Ninite, please tell your friends as it makes clean installs about as hassle free as they can be. you can even suggest new apps and if they get a lot of calls for a program they'll add it to the list, for example myself and several others asked for kilte (has really great DXVA support) and voila! there it is. Enjoy!
And there are plenty of people that still have the 30 day trial of Norton that ran out 5 years ago and haven't updated their OS in just as long...the point? this discussion was about the government, not dumbasses being dumbasses. At least in most cases with the TV they have to go an extra length to be dumbasses as most current routers are IP V4 and are NATed so you can't just waltz in, 5 will get you 10 those Trendnet cams are using the crappy routers you get from the ISPs that usually have every kind of possible security measure turned OFF so they don't have to deal with support calls.
Thanks for the link though, as it does show that what I said about NAT being a good thing is correct. while NAT wasn't originally meant to be a security measure it really does help the really stupid from just blasting all their shit all over the net. But hell if you want to see lists of people being incredibly fucking stupid just look up the Quickbook file formats on any major P2P, you'll see moron after moron that have shared their entire drive with the planet, including their tax records, account info at the bank, just incredible the amount of ignorant shit, but that don't mean we throw out the baby with the bathwater do we?
Doesn't work, and here is why: PPT math. You see they simply go into whatever legislature they intend to corrupt with a PPT and give a spiel like this 'As you can see here our focus group says people like X and people like Y, so by this chart here you can see that we SHOULD have made X PLUS Y but since we didn't? it must be those ebil pirates argh!" and then they will simply take your money in the form of a tax, while getting any draconian law passed, after they hand out the bribes of course. See the extra price added to CDs to cover piracy in many places for example.
You see just like the banks these multinationals have a great "heads i win tails you lose' sort of thing going and there is pretty much not a damned thing you can do to stop it. After all it doesn't matter what the people say or do, the elected officials simply ignore them if it comes down to them or a multinational. throw them out, you just replace shill A with shill B, no change at all. Hell I don't know a single person that has bought one of their CDs at retail in years, we all buy indie artists or pick them up at a used CD shop, see it make ANY difference?
Did they remove the ability to just shoot an email to everybody in your address books? because that is what all my friends and family does. in fact the ONLY thing I've seen everyone doing with their FB profiles is those damned Zynga games. While i personally don't get it those damned clickfests are like catnip to females, I've even built machines based around how well they run FB games.
if G+ wants to take off they need to come up with a ton of games that makes the average guy feel like he is a hamster slapping a lever to get a pellet, the more slap happy the better as that is what the women seem to enjoy. I swear the best day of my life was when I got my GF into mystery and crime solving games like CSI as when she would stay over for the weekend the sound of her tapping that damned mouse every morning (7AM sharp, just like clockwork) made me want to pull an Elvis on my PC.
Riiight, because THAT is what a militant police state would want, free amateur porn. I can just imagine the conversations now "OMFG, would you look at the faces THAT guy is making? It looks like he's gonna drop a deuce LOL!" or "Oh shit, not that fat girl again, every time she bounces its like watching a 70s water bed with all the ripples!"
I can think of a few reasons why something like that might be useful to a government, but watching the average couple fuck? Not enough brain bleach in the world for that my friend, they'd be rolling agents out of the central viewing area with thousand yard stares and just rocking themselves going "Didn't want to see that, didn't want to see that" over and over.
That would be like screaming TROLL when someone says "Rambus is a patent troll". Actually its even worse than that as Rambus did make the occasional product whereas the ONLY reason MPEG-LA exists is to troll, that's it. they don't make any tech, pay for any research, they are a pile of patents gotten together to make sure everyone in the pool gets a cut from their trolling without having their own names being dragged through the muck as trolls.
But if you think it is FUD show me ONE, just one mind you, case in which MPEG-LA was friendly and/or supportive of FOSS. I can already tell you that you ain't gonna find shit, on the other hand you will find plenty of cases of them being hostile to FOSS such as saying they would sue Mozilla if they tried to include H.264 support without paying their license fees.
In the end this doesn't have a damned thing to do with the technical merits of H.264, that is a red herring and in fact Flash often used h.264. No what mattered is that the community was biting the hand that feeds because Adobe was paying the license fee for the ENTIRE community, well guess what? that's over, pay up suckers.
In the end the ONLY ones that got trolled was the FOSS community which Steve jobs played like a harp from hell. It was common knowledge that Jobs hated Flash because it offered a way around his app store, so he talked about how much better his iShiny was without flash and the FOSS community jumped right on board, even though Jobs has always been militant ANTI-FOSS and actually made gates and MSFT look like the Care Bears. it was Jobs that first locked devices to the OS, it was Jobs that first added DRM so you could only use it HIS way, while Adobe let you do any damned thing you wanted, including both distributing AND making a knockoff, did they sue? nope.
So as I said i don't care, my license fees are paid for. if the rumors are correct then Moz will ONLY have H.264 on Windows because MSFT pays their fees, and all it takes is MPEG-LA filing an injunction to have the plugged pulled on X.264 because of their patents. I was simply pointing out the absolute batshit insanity of getting rid of a FOSS friendly if a little clueless company like Adobe for a FOSS hating patent troll. But hey, enjoy your lack of media or paying for your software, my fees are paid in full thanks to MSFT.
Then they REALLY need to change the wording because it is REALLY confusing. I mean i'm sure that when 99.999% of the population hears the word "radio' they automatically think of AM/FM, after all that word has been pretty much the sole property of those bands for over a century. Hell we don't say "Sell me a Wifi radio" do we? Or a bluetooth radio? of course not.
So they should really change the name to "wireless signal processing' or something like that. When you see wireless signal processing you automatically think of ALL the different wireless signals, like BT and Wifi, cell phones, its just a better descriptor. I'm a firm believer in what George Carlin would say about words mattering, and in this case the language is VERY misleading as to what the thing actually does. If they were to start using WSP they would probably get more buzz and people interested in helping as THAT does sound interesting and neat, but software radio makes me think of some crystal radio kinda thing using a PC, not very interesting at all.
And it all depends on what the neighbors actually DO and if they are decent folks or not IMHO. The ones that originally moved onto the land behind my mom's place frankly trashed it, not only did they cut down the trees but they put a couple of mangy horses out there which wiped out the grass and caused little mudflows down onto my mom's property, just a real mess.
Lucky for us when my mom found out who owned that land behind her and called him to complain he was like "What renter? I haven't touched that property in years, i was waiting for my daughter to finish college before i built her a little house out there" so he called the cops and had them evicted and their mobile home hauled off. Now his daughter is in her little house up there and not only did she plant a bunch of nice trees and fix the place back up but when her husband is out there running the chipper and fixing up the place he'll come over onto mom's property and help her out by cutting any dead limbs and putting a little mulch around her trees to make them nice and easy to mow. So i'd say it all comes down to attitude, a little consideration goes a long way. Hell those squatters could have stayed there another 3 years with nobody the wiser if they just wouldn't have acted like assholes.
As for TFA, you do something for free? Tough fucking luck, you knew what you were getting into. I'm sure /. and LinuxInsider is making money off everything i post on either site but so what? does that make me entitled to a cut? its not like anyone forces me join in to Ms Noyes little round table discussions or to comment on /., i do so because i enjoy the conversations with other geeks and trying to find geek hangouts where I live is practically impossible, so having discussions on tech where people actually understand what I say is quite pleasant after dealing with people all day that don't know the difference between HDDs and RAM, or a tower and the monitor. TFA sounds like a bunch of whiny entitled types that got butthurt because nobody would pay them for their "incredible insight". Well if you think your "words of wisdom" are worth so much write a blog and quit giving it away for free, duh! of course if they did that then most likely they would have readerships in the single digits if they are lucky. at least here on /. I can point folks towards good software they may have overlooked like Comodo Dragon and Time Machine or QTWeb, and great sites for geeks like Ninite (Godsend for new installs, check it out) and it gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling when someone comments "Hey, thanks for pointing that out, I tried it and really like it a lot" and THAT is my payment for posting.
So even you admit its the death of the whole "free as in beer" part of FOSS. And frankly it doesn't bother me, i use Windows where MSFT pays my license fee. what DOES bother me is frankly i don't believe the web should be locked down as we already saw what that got us with IE and all those damned proprietary formats like RMV and WMV. I had hope that the developers would stand their ground and refuse to support HTML V5 until a baseline codec was chosen that ALL could use without getting "pay your $699 license fee" but it looks like that is over.
I DO however find it funny as hell the "FOSSies", those that are the rampant fanbois of the FOSS world, can't even see the freight train barreling down the tracks. they had such a fucking hatred for Flash because it was buggy they are too fucking clueless to see what it is obviously gonna be replaced with has more ways to buttfuck them than SCO ever even dreamed of and you know what? Unlike SCO these patents WILL stick and royally assrape any chance of "free as in beer" remaining a viable option.
Personally I'm glad, maybe once free as in beer is thrown in the trash heap of history they will wake the fuck up and realize TINSTAAFL and maybe with all the major distros being forced to charge to pay their $699 license fees and to remove the right to redistribute (because MPEG-LA sure as fuck isn't gonna sell you a blanket license for shit) then MAYBE, just maybe, will the distros have enough funds to make a truly world class OS instead of constantly breaking shit. One can hope after all.
BTW isn't it funny that I get modded as a troll for daring to point out reality? Does ANYONE believe MPEG-LA is gonna be all warm and fuzzy to the Linux community, when it has over 2000+ patents that pretty much cover EVERY possible way to encode and decode video and has been willing to bitchslap anyone and everyone with a lawsuit if they don't pay their $699 license fees? pretty damned funny if you ask me that so many are blinded by their perception bubbles to see they just threw away the mangy old mutt that was friendly known as flash for a rabid pitbull that looks at their ass like a starving man looks at a T-Bone steak. Fucking stupid FOSSies are gonna get run over like a Mac truck and are too damned clueless to even see it coming, too fucking funny.
Then it sounds like the problem is NOT with the cards which I agree have almost gotten to contact lens "Oh shit, nobody move!" levels of teeny tiny but in the reader which obviously should be redesigned. Maybe it should just be an electrical connector and then have the actually processing done on the CPU? it isn't like those aren't insanely powerful now on your average phone. or maybe a specialized ARM chip off to the side somewhere, just not built into the actual reader part.
The problem i have with changing what we have now is not only are the cards too damned teeny tiny as it is, and I agree that they have taken the whole "thin is in" thing too damned far and they are getting to the point they are too easily flexed and broken, not to mention shitty battery life, but my biggest concern is we have every company trying to pull a Rambus when it comes to patents. We have too damned many patents in the phone arena as it is, having yet another patented up the ass design is exactly the LAST thing we need.
I have a good question....why? Are radio chips REALLY expensive or something now? hell all the old analog TV tuners had radios built in and they ended up dropping the feature because nobody used the damned things, so why would you want to do it much more inefficiently in software? this is one of those things like that cassette deck for PCs where i sit there with a serious "WTF?" look on my face because i honestly don't get it. I mean all you are picking up is standard radio, right? no police bands or anything cool like that? hell there are a bazillion free radio station on the net and unlike the clearchannel crapola they play music that doesn't suck.
So I'm sorry if I'm missing something but i really don't get it. Radio is all but dead now anyway, you have tons of free streams, so why care about adding a dying format to your PC?
I'm afraid the preview function often fails, at least it does for me, when I am trying to make a link that isn't clickable. it looks like its not gonna be a link but then /. turns it into a link when you hit submit, or at least it did when i was using the new layout which is one of the reasons I went back to the old way. When i put a link to a small site that i don't want /.ed I do NOT want it to be clickable as everyone knows there are plenty that won't bother with copy/paste unless it is something they really care to see.
As for TFA I wonder how damned long the MAFIAA are gonna play whack a mole before they just accept reality and embrace new technology? there is no damned logical reason why I can't go to Amazon, whip out a CC, and buy a movie or show in .avi or .mkv for playing on my dad's media tank but as it is here are my choices...1.-Buy DVD, 2.-wait for DVD to arrive, 3.-rip DVD into format that will play on media tank, 4.-upload video onto media tank. or I can 1.-download from TPB in the format I need, 2.-stick file on media tank....now which one is easier? Which one has fewer steps?
So why the bullshit, does it in ANY way hinder piracy? nope, in fact the pirates often have the movie or show at or before release day. So wake up and smell the 21st century MAFIAA and embrace the Valve model, make it easy, make it simple, make it cheap. I'm sure you could power half the USA just by wrapping Henry Ford's corpse in copper for all the spinning he is doing in his grave from so many fucking up one of the most basic tenants of capitalism with all their hoop jumping and artificial scarcity bullshit. He'd be cranking that shit out in any and every format someone would give him money for and backing the money truck up to his back door daily.
It just amazes me that all these so called "MBA" or Masters of Being Assholes, can't even figure out the most basic ideas of supply and demand. Black markets are the market's way of telling you that you are fucking up, your price is too high or you aren't offering the people what they want. make it easy, make it simple, make it cheap, and watch the huge piles of money rolling in. In a way it reminds me of how the MPAA had to be literally dragged to the huge profits that videotapes offered, because until the government literally forced them to allow the format to exist they were comparing it to the Boston Strangler. How many BILLIONS did they make off of videotapes again?